ADD stages – Do

ADD comes from “Assess, Decide, Do” and it’s a life management framework, initially described in this introductory post. As opposed to the regular productivity approaches, a life management framework focuses on a higher level integration and rejects the task checking approach as the only metric for measuring productivity performance.

In ADD, each individual can have only 3 main stages or can act in 3 main realms: the Assess realm, the Decide realm and the Do realm. Those stages are cumulative, in the sense that an imbalance in an early stage, like the Assess stage, can create negative consequences in the following stages. A balanced, constant flow between those 3 stages is the main metric of a fulfilling life management.

If you came here directly you may want to check out first the Assess realm and Decide realm posts.

Today will talk about the Do realm.

Closing The Circle

The Do realm is where you are closing the circle you started to draw by assessing and then deciding something. It’s the final stage and the most physical one. Usually, what you’re doing is something touchable, real, as opposed to the Assess or Decide stages, which are mainly mental activities. The Do realm is like the visible part of an iceberg. You know an iceberg can show only a small part on the surface, and this is the Do realm, but the core of it is under the water, in the initial Assess and Decide stages.

The Do realm is also one of the most refined and talked about by productivity experts. Much of the writing and methodologies created in the productivity area is focusing only on the Do realm, including GTD. Productivity and effectiveness are mistakenly defined as a consequence of the Do realm, when in fact they are a consequence of an entire Assess – Decide – Do cycle.

If you did your job in the Assess and Decide stages, you’re not actually doing much in the Do realm. The only three activities are scheduling, prioritizing and finishing.

Scheduling

You have to create an understandable and manageable time frame for your activities and this is done by scheduling. You’re allocating energy and space. You’re putting some order around you. We all live in time and making the most of our time is one of the best thing we can do.

Scheduling means in fact to acknowledge that you will be available for that specific task at a specific time. If you’re not scheduling your activities, you’ll actually reject them from your timeline. You’ll send a message of non-availability. But if you’re scheduling, you’re sending to yourself a message of availability.

As any other activity, scheduling can be improved, refined and automated. There are tons of books on how to use your time, and the intent of this post is not to offer a scheduling tutorial. All I want to stress is that one fundamental activity in the Do realm is scheduling, or sending messages of availability.

Prioritizing

Reality is changing. Your universe is changing. What was important yesterday may not be so important today, or tomorrow. Prioritizing your doing means give room to what’s important now as opposed to what you thought it was important yesterday. Prioritizing comes after scheduling and it’s an important, often ignored part of the productivity process.

Prioritizing will conflict with scheduling and that’s something normal. Prioritizing means giving space and energy to what’s important now and reschedule what was left out. Many people get confused when they have to make changes based on the priority of the tasks but that’s an important part of the Do realm.

How do you know what’s important and what’s not? Well, that is something you will have to micro Assess-Decide-Do every time. As I already mentioned, ADD is an abstract framework and supports any implementation you want. For instance, there will be a different prioritizing strategy in an ADD implementation for programming, than to an ADD implementations for relationships.

Finishing

If you start doing something, finish it. Or cut it out, if you can’t do it anymore. As simple and dumb as it sounds, finishing is a very important part of the doing process. So important, that I felt the need to make it a separate process.

One of the most subtle yet powerful ways to procrastinate (like really procrastinate, loosing your time) is to remain stuck in a project or task for ever. There is this pressure not to finish the task, because… well, because you’ll have to do something else. And you don’t want. Or you are scared. Or bored. Or whatever.

I’ve been there so many times that I had to come up with a finishing strategy. I’ve been caught in so many situations where finishing seemed strange or inconvenient or not appropriate that I really had to reconsider all my attitude towards finishing. I’m sure you’ve been there: caught in a sticky relationship, in a never-ending project, in a just-above-the-fold job, and so on.

Finishing is the most important part of doing something. It frees your resources, it makes room for something new and it feeds the next Assess session. If you’re not finishing what you’re doing, you’ll never be able to assess what you’ve done so far. Your ADD cycle will be stuck.

Creating Miracles

Doing is where the miracle takes place. By doing what you assessed and decided, you’re changing your reality the way you want. Assessing is just a perspective and the decision is just an intention. If those are not backed up with constant activity and with real life actions, your Assess-Decide-Do cycle will be broken.

But if you’re staying enough time in this cycle, if you succeed in Assessing, Deciding and Doing on a regular basis, if you engage totally in each part and let yourself flow freely through those stages, if you really become aware of the whole process, as simple and yet as powerful as it is, you’re going to create miracles.

Starting with yourself.

ADD stages – Assess

ADD comes from “Assess, Decide, Do” and it’s a life management framework, initially described in this introductory post. As opposed to the regular productivity approaches, a life management framework focuses on a higher level integration and rejects the task checking approach as the only metric for measuring productivity performance.

In ADD, each individual can have only 3 main stages or can act in 3 main realms: the Assess realm, the Decide realm and the Do realm. Those stages are cumulative, in the sense that an imbalance in an early stage, like the Assess stage, can create negative consequences in the following stages. A balanced, constant flow between those 3 stages is the main metric of a fulfilling life management.

Today will talk about the Assess realm.

Evaluation

The Assess realm is the place where you will do most of your evaluation. You can evaluate your current situation, the outcome of a previously done task, a possible outcome for a possible task, in one word: everything. In the evaluation process you don’t necessarily have to DO, or DECIDE anything, but this process will deeply impact any of your deciding or doing activities.

Evaluating without the pressure of a decision or a deadline is a very necessary step. Too often I found myself lost in a decisional process or even in the middle of a larger project because I skipped or under-considered the evaluation/assessment step. Assessing something means you’re simply looking at something, you’re acknowledging the fact that something new (or worthy) have entered your focus.

Evaluation is only one of the possible activities in an assessment stage, but it’s usually the one that ends this very stage, by promoting the idea, the project or the task to the decision realm.

Information Management

The assessment stage is the one in which you’ll do most of your information management. Crunching new pieces of information, categorizing them, putting higher or lower in your value system is an activity which takes place in the assessment stage. Again, mixing it with a decision or a doing realm will do no good, as it will either slow down the decision or the doing process, either tamper it with undesired pieces of information.

Managing information is a static activity in itself. You’re not doing anything – doing, as in modifying your universe – while you’re managing information, you’re just classifying various inputs from the outside (or the inside world).

Feed-back

As the name implies, feed-back is an activity which takes place immediately after something was done, after something has been modified in your own Universe. Assessing feed-back is a crucial activity in the assessment stage, it really helps you understand if your actions were improving or wrecking your environment.

You take feed-back by comparing your initial status, the moment you started modifying something in your universe, with your current status. You will receive feed-back for a wide variety of sources: your physical senses (as in it’s colder or warmer than before)., your emotions (this thing makes me feel in a certain way), your memories (this looks a lot like something I’ve done before) or the people you interact with.

Feed-back is usually one of the earliest activities in the assessment stage, as it is often immediately required after an action has been finished.

Observation

Assessment cannot work without fresh information, it needs this as a comparison outlet. In the assessment stage you’ll observe a lot. Observation is an activity closely related to information management, but its place is at the very beginning of the information management. Observation is an input for the information management activity.

As any input, the clearer and less distorted, the best the results. Observing things as they are, and not as you imagine they are is an art in itself. Training observation is a difficult and delicate activity. Becoming a detached observer will make your assessment periods shorter.

Dreaming

Dreaming is the capacity of imagining things which are not yet real. Dreaming plays a very big part in the assessment period. Most of the time, you decide to do things based on deep and extremely emotional inputs, coming from what you call your dreams. Creating a newer and better reality comes from dreaming first, from the ability to imagine unborn things and ignite the triggers to create them.

The classical approach to dreaming is to either discard it totally as completely unproductive, or to classify it as procrastination, the activity in which you are preventing yourself from doing things, by inventing excuses. I do think dreaming is fundamental and is a very productive activity. As long as you acknowledge it as a very necessary step in the assessment realm.

Memories

The things you’re doing are becoming memories the moment you finish them. Accessing your memories is an important part of your life. It helps maintain an identity and a sense of coherence in time. Without memories, your perspective can become twisted. Most of the time, your value system is based on things you recall as being good or bad to you.

Keeping your memories in good shape – like in creating and maintaining a memories management system – will hugely impact your overall presence. Only after you understand the past you, the present you can become a reality. One very common pitfall in the assessment stage is clogging your perspective with unsolved memories, with things from the past which are crying for a newer approach.

Solving those situations in the assessment stage will take a lot of pressure from your decision and doing realms.

Meditation

Assessment needs a clear perspective. When you decide, you already move, when you do, you are the movement, but when you assess, your whole world can slow down, until it becomes stillness. Nobody will rush you. Meditation is one precious activity which can dramatically enhance your perspective. Seeing the world from a sill perspective is enlightening. Meditation can do that.

Of course, is not compulsory to use all of the activities described here, including meditation. As a matter of fact, in real life, it would be rather difficult to identify all those activities in an assessment session at the same time.

When To Move To Decision

The moment you stop assessing something you should immediately move to the decision realm. Staying in the assessment realm for longer periods can induce a sense of comfort and security, which, if not rapidly challenged, will be modified pretty soon  by “outside” factors. In other words, if you don’t move faster, something outside your control will force you to do it.

One thing we should definitely want to remember about assessment, and about the whole ADD paradigm, is that any process can contain smaller, or micro-ADD cycles. During the assessment cycle you may find the need to quickly decide and then do something, and then come back to your main assessment topic. In this respect, ADD is very close to the fractals definitions, in which the smaller parts are actually identical with the bigger parts.

But more on that in the next topic, which will be, of course, about the decision realm.

Assess, Decide, Do

GTD is a wonderful methodology. I’ve been using it for more than 3 years and the benefits are unquestionable. I implemented it in several formats, from pen and paper to digital, and I can confess it really works. I’m productive and more efficient. But – you know, there is a but here – being productive and more efficient is not always enough.

GTD is a methodology for getting things done, period. But there’s so much more to life than just doing. For instance, how you get to know which are the things you want to do? How you know if it’s ok to do those things and not other stuff? How can you assess your overall progress, your internal growth? Certainly, GTD falls short here.

I assume that creating a life management framework wasn’t David Allen’s initial goal. All he wanted to do was to create a tool for making things happening and he succeeded wonderfully. Ironically, he opened a path which eventually made his tool obsolete, at least for me. I already wrote what I kept and what I left out from the GTD hype. And the reason why GTD is obsolete for me now is because I need something more:

A Life Management Framework

Doing stuff is ok. Constantly and effectively getting things done is even better. Is feeding you with self-respect and creates accountability. You have something to show, you did something. But after a while, I don’t care much about doing things. I already created this habit and I’m doing it easier. Sometimes without even thinking, which makes me believe I reached that “mind like water” inner state.

Then why I still feel frustrated? Why I still feel the need for something more? Why I’m not happy anymore just by doing things? Because I need a new paradigm. One that can accommodate my effectiveness with my doubts. My productivity with my laziness (which is not always laziness, maybe is contemplation or meditation). I need a framework to acceptably balance every aspect of my life, not just the doing part.

A life management framework should do that. A life management framework is not a methodology, is not a software, is not a sequence of steps you follow blindly to your presumable redemption. Is just a framework, a wire frame for your own implementation. A life management framework should be light enough to be remembered in one sentence, but powerful enough to sustain your day to day activity as well as your long term goals.

It’s been several months since I came up with my own life management framework. I briefly noted in one of my posts (when I got back from my trip to Thailand) that I will like to share something important for me. The reason I’m doing it only now is because I wanted to put it to test first. As a concept, as a mental projection sounded fine, but I needed to make an implementation for at least a couple of months.

Introducing “ADD” Life Management Framework

As you may already guessed, ADD comes from Assess, Decide, Do. I will start with a brief explanation of the concepts and then I’ll talk about each specific  part .

At every given moment I can find myself in only one of these three stages: assessing, deciding or doing. I’m assessing my current options, I decide what I have to do, and then I do it. From the smallest context in which I may be, up to the long term goals, my overall activity will fall into one of these categories: assessing, deciding, doing.

Every time I have a constant flow between assessing, deciding and doing, I’m managing my life correctly. Every time I have an imbalance in one of these stage, I have difficulties.

If I stay too long in an assessment stage I might lose opportunities or I might lose interest in the desired outcome. If I stay too short in the assessment stage I might lose some precious info, putting at risk my next steps: decision and doing.

If I stay too much in the decision part I may never actually doing what I already assessed and decided. If I stay too little, the outcome might be different from what I wanted.

And finally, if I’m not actually doing it – as in getting things done – the first initial phases were in vain.

A successful ADD life management framework implementation should take care of only two things:

• identify each of your current stage correctly: assessing, deciding or doing
• assure a smooth flow between the current and the next stage

It’s not a big philosophy, but it’s much harder to implement it then to write it. In programming, especially in OOP (Object Oriented Programming) tailoring this ADD framework to your needs would be called: “implementing the abstract class”. Those are just principles, abstract notions and it’s the task of the ADD life management framework to create an understandable, coherent wrapper on top of them.

As a wire-frame, this life management framework should be defined in only 3 words: Assess, Decide, Do.

Now let’s talk about each of those 3 fundamental stages or realms.

Assess

You don’t have to do everything on your agenda, unless you’re a robot with no free will. You have to assess everything around and take into account as many information as you can about any specific task. Assessing is one of the most ignored states of the contemporary, modern individual. When you run furiously in your own rat race trap, you really don’t have time to assess, you just run.

I find assessing vital for a successful outcome of any task, goal or activity I start. If I’m not assessing it enough, if I’m not integrating it into my own personal system of values, bad things are happening. I might get that thing done, but I won’t be pretty happy about it. To say the least. Doing something against your personal values is one of the worst things you can do to yourself.

Integrating a specific task in your personal system of values is of course only one of the things you may want to do in the assessment stage, you can have tons of other things to assess, like the short or long term benefits, the opportunity, the resources availability and so on. You do this on the Assessment realm.

I realized that assessing has a cumulative structure. I put together pieces of information, emotions, memories, until I come up with a specific object. When I can’t add to it anymore, when it looks the same to me regardless of my standpoint, I know it’s time to make a decision. Then, and only then, I can move to the decision realm.

Decide

As opposed to assessing, decision is a one point structure. Once you can’t assess anything anymore, you decide what to do about it. You have only 2 options:

• do it
• don’t do it

If you decide to do it, you’ll move to the Doing realm. If you decide not to do it, you’ll discard the task completely. The nice thing about this dual attitude is that you won’t have to postpone it. You simply decide you ain’t gonna do it, period. You have the freedom to discard it completely or to move it back to the Assessment realm. If you can’t do it now, maybe the future will bring some more info and you’ll be in a better position to make a decision. But you made a decision about it, you can move on.

If I know I have to make a decision about a specific topic I usually do it within a very small time span. Several minutes up to maximum 24 hours. I’m talking about regular, normal tasks like blogging or business. There are some situations in which the decision part can last several months, like moving to a new country or relationship decisions. But if there’s something within my current time horizon, I don’t delay it more than 24 hours.

Being in the Assessment realm before has a very big advantage: I already have all the info I need to work with. Now, if I decided I’ll go further, all I have to do is to move into the Doing realm.

Do

Here is the place for methodologies like GTD. Here is the place in which I make lists and schedule tasks and actually check them as done. If there’s something on my Do list, I know I already passed through 2 filters: Assess and Decide, so I don’t have anything left to do about that task. Except doing it, of course.

The Do realm can be repetitive and can last days or months. It’s not a cumulative structure, although it can produce visible results, and it’s not a one point structure. It’s more like a flow. It’s not unusual to be in the Doing stage for months, if I have a larger project, coding, for instance. Every Do activity or project can be planned and/or managed from within the Do realm, or at least I did it with good results.

Whenever I finish doing some task or project, I go back to the Assessment realm, closing the circle. At this point, I finished an ADD cycle. In this cycle I included a lot of activities, from assessment, to decision making and to actually doing the specific project. Usually, whenever I finish an ADD cycle I have a very deep and powerful sense of well being. Every cycle I finish add to my self-respect in a way I never experienced before. Every ADD cycle is far more than a checked task on a list, is more like reaching the next level on a spiral path.

ADD Imbalances

I couldn’t finish this introductory article about ADD Life Management Framework- yeap, there will be more – without a short section dedicated to ADD possible imbalances.

Assessing Stage Imbalances

One of the most common assessing imbalances is the “analysis paralysis” syndrome. You keep thinking and thinking and don’t do anything. You never move from that realm, you never get to decide what to do with all the information that you gathered so far. All you do is crunching information, in the hope that at some point that information will be useful to you.

Another common assessing imbalance is the “I didn’t know” excuse. You didn’t know that your business was entering a crowded market so you went bankrupt in the first 6 months. Or you didn’t know you’re approaching an aggressive or lazy partner and your relationship is a mess now. If only you took some time to assess…

Deciding Stage Imbalances

The most common deciding imbalance is the “one day I’ll have my own business” syndrome. In this case you took the decision but you aren’t really doing anything to move further. Your decision is strong, you trust yourself and your hopes are high. But you’re not doing anything, you just took a decision and never moved from there.

Another deciding imbalance is very close to shyness: I’m not going to do this, because it won’t matter or because I will feel terribly bad if everybody will look at me. Your assessment was complete, you moved to the point where you can actually start doing it, but you decide to quit.

Doing Stage Imbalances

The most common doing imbalance is the obsessed productivity freak. The guy that does stuff without thinking, just to be able to check some tasks done. This is the biggest productivity trap you can ever hit, and I saw quite often many promising careers falling down because of this. Just doing, without assessing and making the right decisions is a sure path to the underground world of the “still smiling but completely burned down inside” people.

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That was the introductory article about my life management framework. There will be more, because I am just scratching the surface with this one. But until then, I would love to hear your opinions, comments and suggestions. Do you believe in a life management framework? Do you recognize those 3 fundamental states in your activity: assessing, deciding, doing? Do you experience imbalances in any of the stages?